Josiah

Josiah became king of Judah at eight after his father's murder, and in his eighteenth year his high priest found in the temple a book of the law that the king had read aloud to the people, and on which he made a covenant and carried out the most thorough religious reform in the kingdom's history; the book is generally taken to be the core of Deuteronomy, and the reform is the moment the religion of Israel became the religion of one God in one place. He came to the throne about 640, when Assyria's grip on the west was loosening as its own wars closed in on it, and the reform, which Kings dates to 622, was also a declaration of independence. The altars of the Assyrian and Canaanite gods in the temple were burned, the priests of the high places throughout Judah were brought to Jerusalem or dismissed, the child-sacrifice at the Tophet in the valley of Hinnom was defiled, and he extended the purge into the old territory of the northern kingdom, burning the altar at Bethel that Jeroboam had built three hundred years before and, the text says, fulfilling a prophecy about it. A Passover was kept such as had not been since the judges. The scholars who read the Deuteronomistic history as a work of his court see his reign as its purpose and its model king, and the archaeologists find the Judah of his day fuller of settlements and of writing than any before it. Then the world moved. Nineveh fell to the Babylonians and Medes in 612, the last Assyrian king held out at Harran, and in 609 the pharaoh Necho II marched north up the coast to help him against Babylon. Josiah went out to stop him at Megiddo, for reasons the sources do not explain, and was shot by the Egyptian archers and died in his chariot on the way back to Jerusalem at thirty-nine. Jeremiah lamented him. Necho deposed his son and took Judah as a vassal, and Babylon took it from Egypt within four years and destroyed the temple twenty-two years after the reform.

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